


The Grade of This Collapse

by iridescent_blue



Category: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: M/M, Minor Character Death, based on a USS song, destroya shows up, idk the original 4 are still alive in chapter 6 of the comics, it's sad but it gets better i promise, kinda a vent fic??? idk, v minor frerard and petekey but it's all good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 13:16:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14874435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iridescent_blue/pseuds/iridescent_blue
Summary: It's all gone to shit.BL/ind is methodically taking down every crew, all because of Kobra.They're giving up. Most Killjoys are dead, Kobra's crew is in hiding, and there is a slim-to-none chance that they will make it through this firefight.[Based on a song by the wonderful band USS (Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker) called N/A Ok (Grade of This Collapse)]





	The Grade of This Collapse

**Author's Note:**

> Hi this was originally a songfic for a song called N/A Ok by a great band called USS, and I'd highly, highly recommend listening to that song while you read!
> 
> I drew a ton of inspiration from the series The War is Won Before It's Begun by Lbell107 and SavingGrace21, and it's an amazing series of fics that I am h o o k e d on, so go give it a read! Big kudos to them for building a sort-of universe that I put my own spin on.
> 
> This has only been edited about once, so all mistakes (grammar and continuity through comics) are my own!
> 
> Hope that this suits your Killjoy fic needs (since there are pretty much none and it sucks)

Shit was bad. It was really bad. It was the level of bad that is equivalent to every movie where the beloved dog dies, combined with getting sand in your lunch, and then on top of all of that, everyone you know and love is dead. That’s the level of shittiness that Kobra was experiencing. The Killjoy movement was practically dead. BL/ind had staged a full-scale attack on the desert, and now the few surviving Killjoys were frantically attempting to stay alive, much less fight back. Dracs were everywhere, patrolling in hordes with numbers upwards of ten, and the desert was littered with trademark BL/ind body bags, each holding a dead member of the rebellion, left out in the hot desert sun to rot, because according to BL/ind, Killjoys were ‘heartless inhuman monsters who were solely focused on murdering hard-working peacekeeping members in the desert’. The S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W division methodically took down crew after crew, expanding the lifeless wasteland outside the city. They had done this before, but never on this scale. The only place that a Killjoy would be safe is far out of the outer zones, further than they had ever gone before. 

 

Killjoys are conditioned to respond to these kinds of threats in their usual way, with unorthodox fighting, no regard for anyone who wasn’t in their crew, and pure humor. That’s how it had been every time before this. This time, it was different. The rebellion had taken on a fully defensive format, each crew only trying to survive to the next day, constantly on the move, avoiding every living thing in the desert, and that number was falling fast.

 

Kobra only knew of a few who were still out there, and their statuses were constantly up in the air. It was his crew, consisting of Party Poison, Fun Ghoul, Jet Star, and himself. There were a few lone survivors. Killer King had lost his crew, out in Zone 3 in a run-in with a patrol of Crows. The Youngbloods, somehow, had escaped the carnage, even as they fled from the Underground. They were hiding in the furthest reaches of the outer zones, just like Kobra. There were crews left, but they were few and far between. Dr. Death-Defying had gone under the radar, still broadcasting, but now attempting to form some sort of organization. There was no more revolution, and everyone knew it, but Dr. D wouldn’t believe it.

 

Everyone who was still alive was in a bad place. All of them had seen someone who they knew fall to the ground, a hole scorched through their body by a ray gun. Some had stolen Ritalin from fallen Crows, suppressing any and all of their emotions, in a fucked-up way of grieving. Masks and guns were taken by BL/ind, and the tradition of bringing the fallen’s mementos to the Phoenix Witch quickly died out, as well as the hope that the fallen would at least have an afterlife. Instead, they were doomed to rot in bags, rather than letting the desert take them back. All that Kobra wanted was for  _ something _ to happen. He just wanted the whole of Battery City to be swallowed up into the sand, and the desert would become a place of safety, rather than fighting for your fucking life, even though you just wanted to feel alive for the short time that your heart beats while you’re on this hunk of rock. Apparently, Battery City had decided that Killjoys must be completely eradicated. They did this every decade or so, not able to understand that as long as they pretended that the fucked up dystopia of a city was a utopia, there would always be a rebellion out in the sands. Kobra was pretty sure that the real reason that they did this wasn’t because they hated the Killjoys (though that made it easier for them to carry out this bullshit), but because they wanted to show the citizens of the city the power that they had, and that if any citizen disobeyed, they would meet the same fate as all of the rebels in the desert.

 

Kobra had watched some of his closest friends fall, the light fading behind their eyes. That light was gone from any Killjoy’s eyes. Party was a walking ghost, thinner than ever and pale, drugged up every hour of the day. 

 

To top off this absolutely fucking wonderful shitfest, Kobra had been the one to suggest a full-scale assault on the city, which pushed BL/ind to take on the desert once more. This was all Kobra’s fault. Show Pony was dead because of him. So, while he was fighting for his life, he was also ready to just give up. There was this strange part of his brain that told him that if he turned himself in, they would stop fighting the desert. It wasn’t true, but it lingered in his brain. If he hadn’t made a split-second decision to suggest a larger attack with more crews, everything would be fine. Party would be happy, dancing with Fun Ghoul to the old, static-ridden music that Dr. D would play over the airwaves. King would be with his crew, on runs to deliver supplies throughout the desert. Hell, the Youngbloods would still be in the Underground, running it and staging smaller attacks on buildings in the city, and Sandman would still visit Kobra when he could. Everything would be fine. They would all have their other halves, and wouldn’t be crossing their fingers as Dr. D read out the lists of the confirmed dead, hoping that the names of those who they loved wouldn’t be read. 

 

Currently, Kobra was hiding out far in the outer zones with his crew, past where normal Drac patrols ever traveled to. They were in an old, abandoned shack next to some wreckage, presumably from the Helium Wars. It was big and twisted and resembled the mechas that Battery City had used. To Kobra’s knowledge, BL/ind thought that his crew was dead, packaged neatly in body bags in Zone 3. Dr. D had ‘rescued’ their guns and helmets, and BL/ind knew it. Kobra’s hacking ability had helped, as they were able to fabricate a message from a Drac patrol saying that Party Poison, Fun Ghoul, Jet Star, and The Kobra Kid had been successfully eliminated and disposed of, in an acceptable level of dead. Typing out that they were dead gave Kobra chills, and he knew that one day, he might be sending a much less formal message, saying just that, to Dr. D. Being ‘dead’ gave them some sort of edge in the battle of survival, but it also hindered their ability to fight anyone or anything, since the Drac patrols would immediately report that they were still alive. 

 

As Kobra sat there, hating every ounce of himself for suggesting this shitty plan that ended in hundreds of ‘Joys dead, and then losing The Girl (who he heard was now going by Motor Baby) just because he had decided that it was a good idea to rally crews and show Battery City who they really were (which, in hindsight, was not much in comparison to the army of Dracs and Crows). The rebellion had been fading for a while now, but Kobra’s impulsive ass had decided that there was ‘no harm in trying.’ Fuck you, past Kobra. There was harm in trying. Your fucking brother is now drugged up past recognition, some of your best friends are dead, and you don’t even know if your boyfriend is alive. 

 

Kobra had been so focused on hating his entire existence, that he didn’t hear the faint footsteps approaching the shack. Someone was approaching their hideout, and Kobra could hear it through the thin walls of the building. It wasn’t a Crow or Drac, they rode up on loud motorcycles and had nothing to fear since they didn’t even experience that feeling. This was different. This was someone running. They weren’t from the desert, he knew that. They didn’t sound totally human, either. There was this slight metallic sound every time their foot hit the ground. So who (and what) the fuck were they? 

 

The footsteps stopped, followed by metallic clangs. The thing must’ve seen the wreckage and decided to rest there for the night. It was getting dark anyway, and most of the crew had already fallen asleep, except Kobra, who was on watch duty (something that he never had to do before he started this goddamn mess). 

 

Life was shitty enough at this point, and Kobra honestly didn’t care if the thing outside killed him or not. He would be fine with either outcome. So, abandoning any lingering fears that he might’ve ever had, he walked outside, searching for the thing that had collapsed into the wreckage. It wasn’t hard to find them.

 

They emitted a faint blue light, one that Kobra had never seen, except replicated in advertisements that sometimes made their way out to the desert. This was something from Battery City. It was a droid. Specifically, a low-level, cheap porno droid, who had collapsed on top of the pile of twisted metal sheets. How she had made it past the city barrier, Kobra had no idea. Her battery was definitely dangerously low, and Kobra didn’t know how to get her any kind of power in a place that was remote as this, especially since they needed some special robot drug called Plus. He noticed that as she was glowing, it was fading and absorbing into the metal around her. He was too far away, but Kobra thought he could see her lips moving, repeating a mantra, as her hue bled into the metal around her, racing up and down the sheets of steel and curling around the pipes and wires, and it terrified Kobra to think that she was trying to power this pile of metal. She was going to die, but this way she was making it go faster. 

 

The ground started to shake. Kobra sprinted back into the diner, shaking awake the rest of his crew, dragging them to the small window of the shack to watch as the ground heaved. Nobody mentioned their screeches as they watched what happened. Anything that any of them said was completely drowned out by the rumbling and creaking of metal. 

 

The metal started to move, growing out of the sand like some strange time-lapse of a plant growing. The metal that the droid was lying on now curled around her like a hand, protecting her from the rest of the machine emerging from the desert. Sand poured off the rust-covered steel as joints creaked and realigned.

 

Kobra looked at his crew, the awe clear on their faces as they realized who this was. It was a myth, a child’s tale from the city that the Killjoys had taken for their own, the story of something that would one day save them and set them free from BL/ind. 

 

Destroya.

 

This monolithic robot straightened up, cradling the droid in its hands. It was so tall that it blocked out the stars. Electricity flowed through it, and the dark eyes suddenly became alive. Electric charges from broken wires made arcs over the metal as Destroya rumbled and began to move towards the city, a small beacon of light in the dark desert. Everyone in the desert had definitely heard the rumbling, and all the Killjoys knew that there was once again hope.

 

In that moment, Kobra felt alive. He turned to Party, and for the first time in months, his face looked like it used to, before the Ritalin. He was hugging Ghoul to his chest, murmuring sweet nothings to him as they swayed back and forth to music that no one could hear, watching the savior of all Battery City droids on its way to liberate them. The sun was slowly rising, flooding the scene with low orange light.

 

He knew Killer King saw it. He knew the Youngbloods saw it. Everyone in the desert stopped dead in their tracks, watching the liberation of the city begin as a new day and new era dawned. 

 

Before Destroya even had even made it to the central part of the city, just barely breaching the limits, a blast, emanating from the city center shook even the outer zones. The barrier between Battery City and the desert collapsed, vaporized by the strength of the explosion. The blast wasn’t one from dynamite or any man-made bomb. It was something else.

 

Kobra knew without even thinking, that it was Motor Baby. When they had taken her in, Cherri Cola had told him about the power she held, and how she was the one that would take down the city. Kobra never really believed him, since Cherri had been out in the desert much longer than he had, and the radiation from the sun had definitely done something to his brain, but when Kobra saw the shockwave and the barrier fall, he could  _ feel _ it. It was the same kind of feeling that he got when the radio had started working as soon as they had agreed to accept her into their crew. He met Jet’s eyes, and they both silently agreed that it was her. 

 

There was no more rebellion. There was nothing else to fight. There was no more Battery City, no more BL/ind. There were just sand-blasted buildings under the scorching hot sun. No one had to fight anymore and deal with all the hurt.

 

Party went through withdrawals, but he made it through. It was terrifying, watching him thrash on the floor as his body rejected the drug, but when the convulsions stopped, Party Poison was his old self. Their crew resurfaced, and desert life continued on as normal. There was no fear of being shot by Dracs and much less smuggling since there was nothing to hide anymore. Kobra also had time to stay with a certain Killjoy named Mr. Sandman and had some good damn times with him.

 

In Kobra’s opinion, the shitfest that they went through was completely and totally worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow that was a trip
> 
> Would you want a series of this? Like after this fic and just some chill Killjoy fluff that would be fun and cute and not fighting for their lives? Bc I am sO DOWN for writing that
> 
> anYWAY, if you enjoyed, consider leaving some kudos, or even a comment if you have something to say!
> 
> (also go listen to USS in general they're an amazing alt rock/electronic band who I recently was recommended and if you like electric century then I definitely reccommend)
> 
> hope your day is some level of good!
> 
> xx blue


End file.
